PRESS CALL - School children demonstrate outside Nestle Headquarters against Slave Trade Chocolate
28/02/07
Pupils from London schools and youth clubs will be protesting outside
Nestle Headquarters to stop the sale of slave trade chocolate.
Children
from Sir John Cass Primary School in the City of London, and The Hub
youth group in Waterloo decided to try to do something to stop the
forced labour of African children on cocoa plantations which provides
the raw material for a third of all UK Easter Eggs.
They hope
to put pressure on chocolate manufacturers to enforce a "Traffik Free
Guarantee" on all chocolate products which has been devised by
anti-trafficking campaign Stop The Traffik.
We will be reading
testimonies from trafficked children wearing For Sale and £20 signs
round their necks. This was the price one boy was sold for by
traffickers to work on a plantation.
One testimony is of a
young Malian boy called Victor who was forced to work on a cocoa farm
on the Ivory Coast for three years, suffering harsh treatment and
beatings before he managed to escape. He said: "Tell your children
that they have bought something that I suffered to make. When they are
eating chocolate they are eating my flesh."
Boys as young
of 12 and perhaps even younger are taken from homes in Mali by
deception or force by people traffickers and then sold to Ivory Coast
plantations where they are made to work 12 hours a day and seven days a
week, in appalling conditions.
Nearly half the world's cocoa
is harvested in the Ivory Coast. This is a hidden trade; exact figures
are hard to come by. In 2000 the US State Department Human Rights
Report found that over 15,000 Malian children were trafficked into this
area to work as slaves both on coffee and cocoa plantations, the
majority is universally agreed would be on cocoa.
STT chairman Rev Steve Chalke, who will also be present at the rally, said:
'Inevitably the strict enforcement of the "Traffik Free Guarantee" will
eat into chocolate manufacturers profits but last year Nestle profits
rose by 14% to £3.78 Billion, so we think that they can afford to put
their house in order."